Ewan McIntosh | Digital Media & Education

Size does matter

I get sent a lot of ideas for web services that will "appeal to a niche" and, thanks to that book, we're all expected to bow at the Alter of The Long Tail and drink the nectar of the microbrand. I've never been so sure. If you ask me to make the call between a half-empty macrobiotic boutique restaurant and a packed, noisy French bistrot with music that's just a tad too loud, you know which one I'd go for. For ideas to come into existence you only need two. To thrive and survive towards a sustainable future it needs more than village.

The size of the communities around us does matter. That's why more and more of us head to the city, for sure. The more people, the more opportunity to interact, the more opportunity to make good things happen. Or so we'd like to hope, anyway.

I like this WSJ colour piece by former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who features in the video above, as he describes what makes the perfect city. His opinion on size is revealing in the physical world, and sends a reminder to those designing communities in the virtual one: size does matter:

A city can't be too small. Size guarantees anonymity—if you make an embarrassing mistake in a large city, and it's not on the cover of the Post, you can probably try again. The generous attitude towards failure that big cities afford is invaluable—it's how things get created. In a small town everyone knows about your failures, so you are more careful about what you might attempt. Every time I visit San Francisco I ask out loud "Why don't I live here? Why do I choose to live in a place that is harder, tougher and, well, not as beautiful?" The locals often reply, "You don't want to live here. It looks like a city, but it's really a small village. Everyone knows what you're doing" Oh, OK. If you say so. It's still beautiful.

There's a lesson in here for lots of online initiatives in education: the attempt to encourage rather than lead by mandate the use of Scotland's national intranet Glow, the desire to evolve the TeachMeet form of unconference professional development towards something that 'makes change happen', the desire to shake the often unnecessary constraint of national testing in the US and elsewhere.

I still stand with my gut firmly in place: the niche is useful for getting a new trend or fad started, but to move beyond the fad and into the mainstream, for general acceptance to occur and change to follow, you need size. You need the distractions and noise of the city, the niches you don't appreciate, to make your own ideas fly.

Read more of David's piece on the WSJ site.

Why it's important to (want to) know Where Good Ideas Come From

This is the first of eight posts on the theme of Where Good Ideas Come From. Pic from Evil Erin, who was looking for some good ideas in her roommate's bed.

The creative industries in the UK alone are worth some £70bn each year, about 8% of GDP and growing at about double the rate of the rest of the economy, made up by everything as diverse as television production to game-making, book-writing to advertising, public relations to jewellery. For the past year I've been contributing to this industry, learning the art and science of commissioning new media ideas, turning internet, mobile and gaming ideas from paper dreams to running code realities.

In the workplace, we have a variety of processes, individual talents and skills to ensure that most of these dreams turn into good ideas in the real world, from designing efficient challenging structures through which people pitch their ideas, to the knack of producing a contract that not only makes sense but is fair to all parties. A fair dose of gut instinct and knowing the shifting sands of the vast new media landscape contribute to building, hopefully, more excellent ideas than fairly good ones. The processes hopefully eliminate the really dodgy ones altogether.

But given the aims of the initiative with which I'm working - Channel 4's Innovation for the Public - to change people's lives for the better, to have a lasting impact, to achieve technological and social firsts, and to do so with a trademark slug of trouble, finding and generating good ideas in the first place is something that, if we could define it, would make life a lot easier.

Knowing Where Good Ideas Come From in any walk of life leads not just to a more pleasant experience in life, but a better experience for others and a more profitable life for everyone.

Knowing what makes an idea good is one thing. 95% of ideas get rejected, a large number fairly swiftly and, say, 5-10% after having looked in more detail at the issues involved. Few, if any, seem to appear elsewhere suggesting that either the ideas are too costly to get off the ground, leaving a Government or private investor struggling to see their investment have the desired tangible result, or they are cheap to produce but aren't seen as Good Ideas by the intended users or participants.

Knowing what we could do to improve those conditions of creativity is another goal, perhaps more tangible. These conditions, these physiological, physical and mental places are Where Good Ideas Come From.

What's important to consider, though, is that "being creative" is not, as is often the assumed case, a result of some form of change management. All too often, change management and the overpriced consultancies that help you get from there to here are in the business of selling the change of a more creative company or self. If tapping into creativity is reduced to change management, then we are indeed in for a rocky journey. Only 30% of change management programmes achieve any change at all, let alone the intended one and not necessarily a change towards a more creative one. Creativity is something most of us can unearth in the right circumstances with enough time, effort and stamina to see us through the darker moments of our "crappy ideas" being mocked or left out to dry.

And, of course, some of us (most of us?) tend to come up with fairly crappy ideas most of the time, and that's alright, seeing if they work before moving onto the next one when we realise we were heading down the wrong path. Not just in the world of new media and technology, though, is the potential for heading down too many different paths and tangents at once so ripe. Never have the options opening up been so great, the tools at our creative disposal so varied. Creativity is attempting to go exponential when often our more analogue brains and bodies aren't really in a mood for catching up.

With this, change management, that sudden jolt of inspirational energy (or brush of quasi-guru-like consultant fluff), is even less appropriate a model on which to base an rebirth of creativity in our organisations. As George Church put it:

"In a changing world, inaction can be the radical 'action'" (cited by Tim O'Reilly)

Or, as Euan Semple cribbed it:

"Don't just do something: stand there."

It is no happenstance that our first main areas of investigation of Where Good Ideas Come From are nearly all about time (and the lack of it) and the need for us to stand still, do nothing and drink it in. Someone, I can't remember or Google who it was, once said that they were in the habit of taking a day return flight, at least but no more than four hours long (the time of the laptop battery) in order to get things done without interruptions. Sometimes it's just the practice of regularly, say, every Tuesday morning, of taking a flight at 35,000ft to see the world move by a little slower and take it all in, before joining the land at a seemingly faster speed later. Of course, that's not really how it works. We all fly faster when we're taking in the overall view of things at 35,000ft and that seems slower than when we're on the ground, 'only' going at 10mph at sealevel but things seeming too fast to take in, let alone control.

Nor is creativity some elusive black art available only to the few, while the rest of us trudge on with our lemming-like routine. As Colin Anderson, MD of Denki Games in Dundee, puts it:

Today we run the risk of thinking of creativity in the same way as we once thought of electro-magnetism – magical, unknowable, a black art. Poppycock, I say again! It’s a series of deliberate choices – some serial, some parallel, some conscious, some sub-conscious – made by assessing the values of many variables simultaneously through the filters of knowledge, experience and aesthetic appreciation. More variables than we can currently define and measure perhaps, but that doesn’t make it magic. I subscribe to the school of thought that says “art is a science with more than seven variables”, and from where I’m looking creativity is precisely that. (emphasis added)

There are indeed more than seven variables to creativity and therefore knowing Where Good Ideas Come From. I'm going to make an attempt to understand what some of those variables are and would ask for your help in the comments to fill in the inevitable chasm-like gaps.

Where Do Good Ideas Come From?

If we all knew the idea we'd not be writing blog posts like this, reading them or doing workshops on the matter. We'd be busy pulling that limitless supply of creativity out of its hole to see the light of day and bring us riches, joy, learning and new friends.

However, given that we're not, over the next month or so (or however long it takes me to splurge out those thoughts) I'll be summarising on this here blog some of the best online and offline reading and viewing that has attempted to answer that question, throwing in my own unresearched but tried and tested notions (and a few that haven't even got that far). This post will change to reflect the updating posts that will take a peek at:

1. Why it's important to (want to) know Where Good Ideas Come From.
2. Stand There And Do Nothing: Designing beautiful solutions rather than solving ugly problems
3. Creative Genius. Man At Work: Arguments for not working as a team
4. Getting Creativity Done (GCD): How to get productive and clean down the mental decks
5. Nurturing creativity: Worrying about "Tanya's Bow" or the Dinosaurs: Some arguments for caring about the team, not pissing them off and really understanding what failure is
6. Finding your tribe
7. Creating visions, not missions

As they're posted, please leave comments, disagree, add your own links, videos and pictures. I hope that by the end of it we'll have a resource to which we might come back with the stories of how the works, thoughts and attitudes of others have changed the way we operate.

Bookmark this post and come back to it for updates, and subscribe to the blog to get a daily email or RSS feed in your reader every time there's a new post. Take a look at my instructions on how to subscribe.

Brill pic from Chris Metcalf

TeachMeet going (more) global

TeachMeet grew from a meeting of minds around some French food in Edinburgh, during the Spring of 2005. It was the first educational unconference that knew it was one, and continues to achieve as much or more than many 'cons' and 'uncons' that have since followed, relying on a simple set of unbudgeable rules to maintain a high bar of for-teachers-by-teachers structured and unstructured learning, with plenty of fun guaranteed.

I got a lovely email today from our colleagues in Holland, who had attended my first English TeachMeet at BETT in 2008 and wanted to hold one of their own. A year later they have done:

Just wanted to chime in to say thank you for inspiring me into TeachMeets. We held our first Dutch one last week and it was an absolute success. Fully booked room ('bout 65 attending) enough sponsors for free drinks and some great prizes for the raffle. Participants and sponsors were all thrilled by the concept and how it worked out on the evening itself.

I got conference organizers asking me to organise TeachMeets alongside their events. It looks like Holland (well, the whole world really) is ready for creative and informal ways to meet and learn.

I love it when a good plan comes together. Check out some nice pics, and encourage them to do away with the rows the next time ;-)

TeachMeet09 at BETT - Free-dom!

When I helped start the educators' unconference, TeachMeet, back in 2005 it was to copy the mantra of my old school magazine (for pupils, by pupils) for a group of people who had often felt disenfranchised by the technocratic, bureaucratic jargon of Central Office HQ: it's for teachers, by teachers. Thus, it would be free (as in beer) and free (as in speech).

I was concerned when I saw earlier this week that the company behind BETT, the big January trade show in London, were charging nearly £14 a head for those who happened to find out about TeachMeet09 through their site, especially since the wiki, where all the discussion, sponsorship and action happens, is easy to use and, importantly, free.

Well, a quick email to the trade exhibition organisers this morning with the highest levels of diplomacy in evidence ("I'm sure this is merely an administrative error, but really...") has led to the removal of the charge and a refund to all those who have paid it already. It would be nice to hear from some of those folk here to be reassured that this has indeed happened.

With new commitments I'll not be able to join in the love, larks and music of January's "learning experience" but wish all those helping to bring the event together the very best. Enjoy creating some further, much-needed change in the way our kids learn.

TeachMeet08 Credit Crunch Edition: Homeless

It's 10pm. I can't sleep. In just over two weeks' time we're supposed to be having a gathering of Scotland's most innovative educators who care to show up for the ninth TeachMeet, at Learning and Scotland's Scottish Learning Festival. Fifty clever people have already said they'll turn up, speeding across the M8 and A9 to get there. The topics are fascinating. But we have no home, no wifi, no beer.

Traditionally, I've had enough time 'donated' by LTS to go find all of the above, and generally, thanks to some incredibly generous support from the likes of Softease, Channel 4 and RM, and efforts of those who come along, we've had an amazing evening that has genuinely pushed thinking forward, and changed the face of the well-funded main shows (Scottish Learning Festival and BETT).

This year, though, despite knocking on some new doors, we do not have the venue/wifi/affordable beverage combination that we require. We have had an offer of a space within a hotel a taxi-ride away from the SECC, but hotels have traditionally been more problematic than welcoming: wifi is rarely anything but extortionate and the £8 "corking charges" are tragically predictable. Frankly, if we don't have the required combo by close of business Friday I doubt the future of TeachMeet08 at the Scottish Learning Festival. It may just be Meet08, down at the local pub on Clydeside.

It's time to see whether the TeachMeet that invariably has been described as the "best CPD ever" by Mr Bray, and "what professional development is all about" by Mr Heppell, can survive on crowdsourcing alone.

This is a last-ditch attempt to gain the ears of those whose livelihood it is to support professional development of teachers (and not the ears of those who job it isn't, but who have previously so generously given): show your £s, and help not only provide a venue but the environment that makes TeachMeet different from every other stilted CPD event out there. It sounds crude, but it sounds necessary to me, too. We do not need a hotel room; we need somewhere inspirational, funky, cool. TeachMeet shouldn't have to beg; given its rep and what happens when the venue is right, it should have a venue to match its 50+ teacher speakers.

And, in the meantime, if the TeachMeet community have some ideas of more informal inspiring venues that could still work for helping people share their innovations, get them on the wiki pronto!

Photo: Homeless

TeachMeet08 at the Scottish Learning Festival

TeachMeet08 SLF2008
Originally uploaded by Edublogger

Things have started to move on the TeachMeet08 site, and you're invited to add your name to the list of attendees for an evening of sharing some of the coolest and most exciting ideas for learning from this past year on September 24th.

I'm not able to take quite as much of a role this year in shaping the sponsorship, although I've put some feelers out for a potential venue. LTS have offered some degree of support already in that respect if one of our current short leat of potential places can't work out.

However, if you can help in any way  - beer money, £x towards any costs or a particular expense in particular, cool stuff - then please add your name, organisation and contribution to the wiki.

There are lots of reasons for getting involved in this kind of way, none more appealing than the fact the event has, for the last three years, taken on "must attend" status amongst many of the most innovative teachers in the country, particularly those making use of new media and gaming in the classroom. The potential for some blog link love and good word of mouth about your stuff is great. Here's hoping you can help!

1501st post on edu.blogs.com - it's a winner!

Having spent far too long enjoying the superb suggestions for using a visualiser I'm ready to announce who's going to be offered the chance to pick up their very own - for free - from a dodgy pickup on the Redbridge platform of London's Central line. As a double celebration this is my 1501st post on edu.blogs.com. Hurrah! Thanks to you all for following me this long on my learning journey.

I won one of these devices, shown off with a certain degree of style by John Davitt in his recent BLC08 keynote, at the North East London TeachMeet, courtesy of the Visualiser Forum. The suggestions for its use included a lot from the world of science demonstrations, showing how to exploit Nintendo DSes and cutting down on photocopied texts. However, the example that, for me, shows a longer-term sustainability, with the student and not the teacher as the main user of the device, is Jaye Richards' short but sweet idea:

I saw these being used in Finland where there was one in every classroom in the schools I visited. I think though, that I would use it for pupils to do regular show and tell/ mini teaching sessions where they came up and demonstrated something or described a concept using their own objects or designs. I think this is a great way of encouraging real literacy and raising the confidence and self-esteem of our pupils. This approach also encourages deep learning and helps the pupils to take on the responsibility for their own lerning, and that of others. It takes peer-assisted learning to a new dimension.

I like the hook into Finland's exemplary practice, which I've been harping on about on this blog for some time, and I like the fact we're looking at peer assessment and student-centred show and tell, an underestimated skill and one that underpins TeachMeets.

So, Jaye, if you can get yourself and a visualiser from London back home, it's yours! Thanks to Anthony at Redbridge who has been keeping it locked up for me all this time. Indeed, he is the person with whom to coordinate your reunion with the kit.

McKerouac - A Month Stateside

It takes about two days, really, to get door-to-door from Edinburgh to anywhere in the States, so one might as well make as much of an invitation Stateside as one can.

Thanks to an initial generous invite to keynote Alan November's Boston-based Building Learning Communities (now sold out and with a long waiting list) later in July, and a tentative word-of-mouth twit/blog/email digital breadcrumb trail, I've been able to set up a month of events, conferences and research in the USA, with the total cost the Scottish taxpayer amounting to no more than about four nights in a hotel. A fair return on investment, I hope, from the following activities:

June 25th: Greenville, South Carolina
Contact me: Drury Inn Suites
I'll be keynoting the Upstate Technology Conference on some of the Participation Culture work I've been doing, and providing a few workshops on gaming, pro podcasting and exploiting digital images for learning. I'm really looking forward to meeting an increasing number of SC educators who have come out of the Twitter woodwork and blogosphere these past few months to virtually greet me. I'll also be thrilled to kick off one of about three rencontres this month with David Jakes, who I've not yet had the pleasure of hearing doing his thing.

June 27th: Arrival in San Antonio, Texas
June 28th: EdubloggerCon, San Antonio, Texas
Contact me: Hilton Palacio del Rio
Two things. First of all, I'm wondering with my 'spare' night in San Antonio whether Mr McLeod is anywhere nearby - or would like to be - for a reenactment of our Malt and Hops sesh last February. Secondly, I'm hoping to share some impromptu thoughts and, above all, I want to really get to the bottom of where US education is at in 2008. With every blog post from the States, I have to say, the virtual heads hang a little lower, a little more frustrated with a perceived lack of interest, progress or time and money to do things right. This is not the case in some other countries I've been fortunate to visit recently, including India, Slovenia, New Zealand or Holland; I'd love to understand why the States seem to be at a crunch point, see whether, in fact, they are, and, importantly, what might be done to reverse that. This group of educators is probably the best placed to look reflectively on a touchy issue. Hopefully some of them won't mind giving their rundown to camera.

June 29th-July 2nd: NECC, San Antonio, Texas
Contact me: San Antonio Marriott Riverwalk
I've ended up swinging a mini panel gig at this, thanks to the generosity of Uncles Will and Jakes. It's on the potential of video streaming for learning, for professional development, for, I dare say, entertainment.
For this week I'll be blogging primarily over at Connected Live, and hopefully updating with some video. LTS colleague Andy Pendry, currently working as the Technology Adviser for Glow, Scotland's national intranet, somehow managed to wangle a ticket and will be there, too, along with some BBC Scotland colleagues. I'll attempt to record a few wags of chin with them.

July 3rd-6th: Burbank, California
Contact me: Safari Inn, Burbank
The foothills of LA will be my home for a few nights as I finish off an eight-part video podcast production for learners of Spanish back in Europe. It's going to be launched on the MFLE later this summer, providing something a bit more attractive to an audience of teens back home, showing what Mexicana teens in the San Fernando Valley get up to, the strains they have with the older generations and the pressures they face in their day-to-day life in this huge City of Angels.
The (young) production company, Alas Media, is one that was a twinkle in our eye last summer as I canoed with Marco Torres' proteges Rosa and Miguel, trying to convince them that starting their own company would be a lot more exciting at their age than following the more traditional routes university was leading them down. Hopefully, what's turned out this past year has confirmed that for them. I'm just looking forward to spending July 4th eating Mexican, if I can find a home that'll take me in :-)

July 6th-July 10th: New York City, New York
Mrs Edublogger and Mc Mini will be joining me in New York for some (required) holiday vacation. Any ideas what we should see and do? So much to choose from, and we don't want to shatter ourselves. In fact, is it possible just to chill in the Big Apple?

July 10th-July 22nd: Boston, Mass.
Contact me (from July 14): Newton Marriott
Heading back up to Boston for more hols, with a few days near Harvard Yard before taking the T-line to Newton for the Building Learning Communities conference that kicked this itinerary off in the first place.
I'll be running a pre-conference workshop which still has a few places left if you're quick: come and enjoy taking some time in what gaming culture can bring to learning in the classroom and at home.

Come the opening day of the conference proper, I'll be a tad nervy as I deliver my keynote, It's Not All Native Wit, trying to get to the bottom of what makes some education systems 'good' and others less good. The title comes from the slight annoyance I've had over the years when demo-ing ideas for the classroom: "It's alright for him, he's young/a guy/a geek/got more time than I do/hasn't got kids of his own/can't sleep at all (delete as applicable)". For me, it's nothing to do with possessing some kind of pedagogical super powers or working a longer day than anyone else. I haven't and I don't. This talk will hopefully get to the bottom of what can make teachers even more remarkable beings than they currently are. I don't know what the reaction will be to a talk based on an annoyance, but this, after all, is where most innovation comes from: a problem or challenge that needs a quick, cheap long-lasting solution. I'm hoping this won't be any different. I'll let you know in a month...

Other sessions include more digital image work, a keynote follow-up and an appraisal of the trials and tribulations of this past year, trying to get more Local Authorities to follow East Lothian's example, and empower their staff (or make the staff feel empowered) to get online and share.

If you're around in any of these locations over the next month, do get in touch. I can't guarantee to be able to have a beer with everyone, though I don't mind trying. Above all, if you have places I need to eat, local foods and drinks I need to sample, or locations I have to visit, leave them in the comments here.

Pics: Greenville hills  |  San Antonio Riverwalk  |  Burbank LA  |  New York  |  Boston

Unleashing The Tribe: small passionate communities

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This is the 25-minute keynote, Unleashing The Tribe, which I delivered at the Tipperary Institute in May this year, a shorter version of the 90 minute marathon I was invited to give at Redbridge Council the same week. It's a "here's where we are now" on what makes communities tick online, on mobile, in face-to-face settings, and why understanding this is so important for learning, borrowing unashamedly from Clay Shirky, danah boyd, a plethora of the hundred or so research reports that have crossed my browser this past 12 months and all the conversations I've had, blog posts written. Not bad for less than half-an-hour of audio and slides.